Dominique Writes

Lots of people have been asking me about the ‘safety’ of epublishing – how do you prevent people ‘stealing’ your stuff? Of course, with your books stored in a cloud like this, it’s so much easier for a whole group of people to share that one account. But then we just need to remember the book clubs of the bricks and mortar world. Publishers and booksellers now woo book clubs – even though each book gets shared by the whole club, these buyers end up with more spend.

As Cory Doctorow points out (crediting Tim O’Reilly), it’s not ‘piracy’ but ‘obscurity’ that publishers and writers should fear. ‘Of all the people who failed to buy this book today, the majority did so because they never heard of it, not because someone gave them a free copy.’